With the increasing popularity and advantages of paperless technology, digital information storage and information management through the use of data centers has emerged as an arguably essential part of commerce, communications, education, and government functionality. A data center, or server farm, provides the necessary computer systems required for data processing, data storage, telecommunications and Internet connectivity. Data centers have become ubiquitous and are found in banking, entertainment, news outlets, high-technology industry, universities, and governmental institutions, to name just a few. These and others like them operate or make use of such data centers to aid in business transactions, information management, telecommunications, data processing demands.
With the growth in popularity and use of paperless technology, the use of data centers has grown as well. Demands on data centers are increasing with the increased use of electronic transaction in banking, the popularity of internet communications and entertainment, the rising use of electronic medical records, as well as the growth seen in e-commerce, to list but a few of the many factors. Since 2000, according to an EPA report to Congress, increasing demand for computer resources has led to significant growth in the number of data center servers, along with an estimated 5× increase in the energy used by these servers and the power and cooling infrastructure that supports them. The EPA report notes that this five-fold increase in energy use translates into increased energy costs, increased emissions from electricity generations with accompanying greenhouse gas emissions, along with the added strain to the current power grid required to meet this increased power requirement, not to mention the added capital expenses required for the expansion of current data center capability as well as cost associated with the construction of new data centers.
Therefore, with the rising interest in improved energy efficiency in all sectors of society, there has also been mounting interest in improving the energy efficiency of data centers as well. Several new technologies providing energy efficiency solutions include blade servers and adaptive cooling. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), blade server shipment will exceed 40% of world wide server shipments by 2013. However, all the improvements are incremental and evolutionary. It is clear that in order to bring the power consumption down to the 2000 level, new breakthroughs in system technology and architecture are needed.